FORT HOOD — Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford was looking for the Army psychiatrist accused of shooting him from the first moment he entered the small post courtroom here.

Then their eyes locked.

"It was a war," courtroom sketch artist Pat Lopez said, "which one of them was going to blink first."

A combat medic, Lunsford encountered Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan in an evidentiary hearing Wednesday, marking the first time they've seen each other since crossing paths at a deployment center nearly one year ago.

It was the first day of testimony in an Article 32 hearing that could lead to a trial and the death penalty for Hasan, charged with killing 13 and wounded 32 others in a shooting spree Nov. 5 at the Army post.

The investigating officer, Army Col. James Pohl, opened the hearing by denying a defense request to delay the hearing.

Pohl, who will advise commanders if they should order a trial, didn't explain the nature of the request, which the defense filed in writing in a bid to keep it from being made public.

Lunsford was the first to testify and recount what happened that November day.

He walked into the courtroom and slowly sat in the witness chair. A 20-year veteran blinded in one eye by one of five rounds, he rarely missed the chance to stare down Hasan.

When he wasn't facing one of the attorneys questioning him or looking up at a diagram of the soldier readiness center where he worked from Feb. 9, 2009, to the day of the shooting, Lunsford looked directly at Hasan.

'An infrared beam'

Their first encounter at the soldier readiness center that deadly day was brief, with Lunsford recalling that Hasan walked past him. A moment later, a voice pierced the air.

"Maj. Hasan yells Allahu Akbar!" he told the court. "After that, I looked at him and wondered why he would say Allahu Akbar."

Then Lunsford saw a handgun.

"I noticed the weapon he was firing had an infrared beam."

With the gunman squeezing off rounds, Lunsford moved into a crouching position. A moment later, he said, a civilian physician's assistant, Michael G. Cahill, came out of a cubicle with a chair raised over his head.

"Maj. Hasan at that time turned his weapon on Doc Cahill," Lunsford said, looking at the diagram of the readiness center.

Lunsford said he went into a prone position and shifted into "E and E mode" - escape and evasion.

More gunshots rang out. To describe how it sounded, Lunsford knocked on the wooden witness stand six times, his knuckles striking the surface.

He eyed a door and figured he could make it in two strides, but the idea backfired. In making a break for it, he suddenly encountered the shooter.

"When I started, Maj. Hasan and I made eye contact. He looked at me and I looked at him."

The gunman raised his weapon. Lunsford closed his eyes and a shot rang out, the bullet hitting his head above the left eye.

'Didn't blink'

Asked to identify the shooter, Lunsford rose from his chair and pointed at Hasan, then stared at him again after sitting down.

Lopez, the courtroom artist, noticed the staring match when Lunsford entered the courtroom.

"I stared at his eyelashes and (Hasan) didn't blink. It was which one of them was going to blink first," said Lopez. "Lunsford didn't back down."

Lunsford was followed by Michelle Harper, who dropped her head and sobbed on the stand while a recording from a 911 call she placed during the Nov. 5 shooting was played.

Hiding in the nook of the desk near a packed waiting area called Station 13, Harper said she saw a pair of boots march past her on the other side, the footfalls landing softly and deliberately on the tile floor.